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Cabinet Reshuffles and Parliamentary No-Confidence Motions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2022

Thomas G. Fleming Open the ORCID record for Thomas G. Fleming [Opens in a new window] ,
Bastián González-Bustamante Open the ORCID record for Bastián González-Bustamante [Opens in a new window]  and
Petra Schleiter Open the ORCID record for Petra Schleiter [Opens in a new window]
Thomas G. Fleming
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University College London, London, UK
Bastián González-Bustamante
Affiliation:
Department of Management and Public Policies, University of Santiago, Santiago, Chile Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Petra Schleiter*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
*
*Corresponding author. Email: petra.schleiter@politics.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

How do cabinet reshuffles affect the parliamentary opposition's use of no-confidence motions in the government? Opposition parties employ no-confidence motions as electoral signals to highlight government incompetence and to position themselves as a government in waiting. We argue that cabinet reshuffles – which prime ministers use to respond to policy failures, scandals, poor ministerial performance and disloyalty – present an opportunity for the opposition to deploy no-confidence motions to this end. The incentives to deploy this strategy, however, are contingent on the nature of the party system and are greatest where party-system concentration positions a single opposition party as the alternative to the government and sole beneficiary of a no-confidence vote. We test this expectation using a multilevel modelling approach applied to data on reshuffles in 316 governments and 16 parliamentary democracies, and find support for our expectation: cabinet reshuffles raise the probability of no-confidence motions conditional on party-system concentration.

Keywords

cabinet reshufflesno-confidence motionsparliamentary democracyparty-system fragmentation
Type
Article
Information
Government and Opposition , First View , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Government and Opposition Limited

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